As I wondered, I kept on seeing their faces in these their doorways and at these their windows. I saw them seated at these their cafés, along the side-paths. I heard their rich, liquid Antwerp voices speaking French with a soft, swift rush, or twanging away at Flemish with the staccato insistence of Flanders. I felt them all around me, in all the deserted streets, at all the shuttered windows. It was too colossal a thing to realise that the five hundred thousand of them were not in their city any longer, that they were not hiding behind the silence and the shutters, but were out in the open world beyond the city gates, fighting their way to Holland and freedom. And now I wondered why I was here myself, listening to my echoing footsteps through the hollow silences of the "Ville Morte." Why had I not gone with the rest of them? Then, as I walked through the dead city I knew why I was there. It was because the gods had been keeping for me all these years the supreme gift of this solitary walk, when I should share her death-pangs with this city I so passionately loved. That was the truth. I had been unable to tear myself away. If Antwerp suffered, I desired to suffer too. I desired to go hand in hand with her in whatever happened when the Germans came marching in. Many a time before had I loved a city--loved her for her beauty, her fairness, her spirit, her history, her personal significance to me. Pietra Santa, Ravenna, Bibbiena, Poppi, Locarno, Verona, Florence, Venice, Rome, Sydney, Colombo, Arles, London, Parma, for one reason or another I have worshipped you all in your turn! One represents beauty, one work, one love, one sadness, one joy, one the escape from the ego, one the winging of ambition, one sheer æstheticism, one liquid, limpid gladness at discovering oneself alive. But Antwerp was the first and only city that I loved because she let me share her sufferings with her right through the Valley of Death, right up to the moment when she breathed her last sigh as a city, and passed into the possession of her conquerors. Suddenly, through the terrific, inconceivable lull, hurtling with a million memories of noises, I heard footsteps, heavy, dragging, yet hurried, and looking up a side-street opposite the burning ruins of the Chaussée de Souliers, I saw two Belgian soldiers, limping along, making towards the Breda Gate. Both were wounded, and the one who was less bad was helping the other. They were hollow-cheeked, hollow-eyed, starved, ghastly, with a growth of black beard, and the ravages of smoke and powder all over their poor faded blue uniforms and little scarlet and yellow caps. They were dazed, worn-out, finished, famished, nearly fainting. But as they hurried past me the younger man flung out one breathless question: "_Est-ce que la ville est prise?_" It seemed to be plucked from some page of Homer.